On January 3rd, 2020, the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, was assassinated. He was traveling in a convoy on Baghdad’s Route Irish—“Death Street”—a 10-mile stretch of road that marks the site of multiple American deaths at the hand of Soleimani’s own perpetrators. At this beautifully symbolic location for the death of a U.S. enemy, Trump took decisive action, altering a precarious political balance that could have swiftly catalyzed armed skirmishes in Iran. Although popular news outlets produced breaking news coverage of the situation, the majority of young Americans received the news of Soleimani’s assassination through trending hashtags—#WWIII, #Iran, and #UrFavIsDrafted. In fact, while at dinner, I told my friend I was writing this article about Soleimani and Iran, she stared back blankly, but when I qualified it with “the #WWIII memes”, she immediately chuckled, “OH! I know what you mean!”
It is clear that social media platforms have acquired new relevance as political currency. But what repercussions will this have for the proliferation of news regarding serious events? Does the use of memes, captions, and hashtags create an international, networked public that responds and grapples with geopolitical issues in a time of unparalleled turbulence and political upheaval? Are the #WWIII memes thereby a psychological coping mechanism rooted in collective, palpable fear? Or, is this method of managing fear ultimately belittling the imminent and terrifying repercussions for Iranians on the ground?
Social scientists continue to emphasize the importance of social media in shaping the collective public consciousness and contouring common belief systems. On the one hand, social media has created a new topography of global political discourse that the public constructs and moderates. Numerous works of nonfiction - Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci, for example - analyze the construction of a “networked public,” a redefined polity that is manipulated, veiled, and distorted through the screen. Here, citizens engage in political debate, promoting their personal opinions and consuming the arguments and belief systems of others. This discourse is both comprehensive and sheltered, as readers follow, click-on, and watch media similar to their own opinions.
Simultaneously, this social media landscape is a tool for the powerful. World leaders like Trump and Soleimani can create the appearance of popular support and political strength with only a press of a button. This meme-based exchange of political activity is a 21st century phenomenon—more specifically, a post-2016 phenomenon—that has deeply reconfigured the public sphere, which now grants agency to any individual to reach masses of people. For politicians and prominent military figures such as Soleimani and Trump, participation in these public trends offers a unique degree of relatability to the public. They can interact directly with citizenry and supporters, bridging political divides through the use of humor and references to widely-loved cultural artifacts—the bestselling series and T.V. show Game of Thrones, for example. In this way, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, and other popular social media platforms have reconstructed a newly receptive public to political issues as filtered through memes, tweets, captions, or videos.
Ultimately, however, we must be critical of the viability of conducting politics through these new avenues, as social media undercuts our standard and respect for well-reasoned arguments. While detailed opinion pieces and memos satisfied the evidence-based political environment of the pre-social media past, today’s Twitter news cycle appeals instead to the currency of its medium: the cheap emotion and quick wit that can be packaged into a 50 character limit. This degrading of the public forum occurs at all levels, from the thread of a politically active Twitter user to the highest seats of global political power.
Thus, social media exposes the public to fleeting and rarely well-contemplated ruminations of politicians, shrouding legitimate policy action and international news with hot-headed, provocative statements. In the Soleimani case, viewers seized control over social media coverage of the event, pumping memes and tweets joking that teenagers would be drafted into the ensuing WWIII. While these memes may have stemmed from a legitimate fear, the rapid outward radiation of the trend #YourFavIsDrafted and #WWIII caused users to join the bandwagon for the purpose of espoused hilarity and online fame, rather than out of a genuine concern for the Iranian political situation.
The owners of the account, #YourFavIsDrafted, justify their actions by claiming: “If we think of World War III, if we look into that, any of us could be really scared. So it helps us quell that uncertainty by trying to make light of it.” [1] It can be argued, however, that the majority of memes circulating social media are rooted in ignorance, not from a genuine fear of Iranian-American tensions escalating. Those intimately connected to the issue, such as Iranian-Americans that have family in Iran, must face the gravity of this situation. For example, Roz A., a seventeen year-old Iranian American from California garnered 103,000 likes on TikTok for a video about seeing her cousins in Iran on the battlefield. Despite her viral reception, Roz A. comments that while there are “some jokes that are funny,” social media is also flooded with many that “don’t understand the situation well.” In fact, Roz A. concludes that she is uncomfortable “seeing them making those uneducated jokes about a situation that could be very serious”—potentially deadly, for her relatives on Iranian soil. [2]
In the tense days after the Soleimani assassination, many young people in America experienced a new feeling: helplessness, as they imagined their lives broken by World War III, the Selective Service, and the fear of state violence. Their social media response, in the form of hyperbolic hashtags and dark humor, was veiled behind iPhone screens, manicured lawns, and white picket fences. The irony is that for many in the region, from Iraq to Syria to Yemen, the perpetual threat of bombings, death, and violence is everyday. Ultimately, the volume, forcefulness, and attentiveness of Americans' online response to Soleimani's assassination relative to those currently living through state violence is an indication of Americans' sense of implicit geopolitical privilege:
“we deserve for our lives, livelihoods, and loved ones to go unaffected by the brutality of military violence, but you do not.”
References
[1] Rosenblatt, Kalhan. “Gen Z Uses Memes to Cope with the Idea of a 'World War III'.” NBCNews.com. NBCUniversal News Group, January 10, 2020.
[2] Ibid.